Using AI To Create Better People
Artificial Intelligence and much automation have two viable paths. One path supported by companies like IBM is to enhance employees. The other, more familiar path is to replace them with automation. I’m working with theWorld Talent Economic Forum. A recurring topic is how do we improve the quality of candidates coming out of education and better assure students’ success. A relatively common comment by our panelists is that schools aren’t training students well for today’s jobs, let alone the skills needed for tomorrow’s jobs.
Today we spoke about how AI could address both issues resulting in better employees and more successful lives. Let’s talk about that this week.
Typically educators in higher education either aren’t or never have been practitioners of what they teach. Their career path has been in education, and they often take a standard curriculum that was developed years or even decades earlier; students read and remember out-of-date textbooks and then test them on what they’ve learned. On the other hand, students often treat higher education as a right of passage without any real idea of what they want to do or even whether they’ll even like the job that this education anticipates. So you have two critical issues; the curriculum is focused on competitive grades that often show little more than the ability to study and recall what was studied. Also, you have students who don’t even know what they want to do, let alone develop the skills necessary.
Fixing this would seem to be a three-step process where an AI-focused solution could be highly beneficial.
We have a great deal of data on people’s careers, likes and dislikes, competencies, and personal assets and liabilities. From this, we should determine early on what personality traits and interests would best match certain work types. For instance, someone that is gregarious, charismatic, and good-looking would likely do far better in a sales job, while someone that was an introvert, liked math, and loved to create things might be better as an engineer. Salespeople typically don’t need advanced degrees, but they have to learn and talk about the products they sell to do better, going from high school into a sales training program and avoiding college. Depending on what they were interested in, the engineering candidate might do better in a trade school than a university.
Before going to college, an internship would likely do both people good as it would showcase if they incline the resulting career suggestion.
To do this right, the goal of the AI should be assuring a happy life. Using the analytics captures those that test as happier at retirement as a baseline for testing the AI. Based on what it knows about the individual and others, recommend both a career and achieve it optimally.
